The rapid growth of social networking sites on the Internet attests to the need for individuals to maintain their business and personal relationships and connections. In spite of the inroads made by modern telecommunications the value of face-to-face meetings remains intact, though time pressures for busy lives and geographical distances in can make it harder to meet in person.
In this environment, maintaining “social” connections ends up taking back seat to required mobility for business, in spite of the benefits that social meetings confer in terms of personal well being. But, what if technology could overcome and turn the shortage of time and length of distances into an opportunity for meaningful meetings?
Consider the example which is oft-repeated in some form: a traveler from New England returns from a trip to Orlando, Fla., for a conference—only to find too late that so did his friend who normally lives in California. Or, a new mother who is traveling less frequently now finds that a business acquaintance, who normally works in San Diego, was in Boston for a day.
The parties in these examples could easily synchronize and meet up if they could publish to their “circle of friends,” ahead of time, where they expect to be traveling. The present invention makes possible just such publication of future meeting opportunities, securely to one's trusted family, friends and associates. Among the key features of this invention is a radar-like interface which captures the time and geographical data in an easily understood and interpreted graphical format.
At the present time, a few web-based services are available with their own interfaces and protocols, which allow a user to share personal location information with others based on that user's instructions. Examples include dopplr.com, Gowalla.com, loopt.com, buddy alert, friendfinder, hello, Foursquare.com, Plancast.com, Facebook Places, as well as Yahoo's “Fire Eagle” project.
These services differ in important ways from the present invention. Most of these products or services, for instance, are concerned with where the user is “now,” as opposed to information relating to a user's “future” location.
Publishing the location where the user will be in the next few hours, days or weeks to the user's circle of friends and family has utility beyond putting out information about where the user happens to be at the moment of publication. Getting “I am here” messages from a number of your friends is nice to know, but it cannot translate into an opportunity to meet any of them in person unless you are within a commuting distance at the time. Getting a message from a friend where s/he will be in a week may permit the recipient to coordinate a meeting in a place where neither normally resides. For busy travelers that kind of information makes possible an in person meeting without added expense to be in the same space-time zone.
Learning of the future plans from a large number of friends can also be more useful than getting the “I am here” message in real time from them. The extra lead time increases the probability of a meet-up without the relatively unproductive exercise of having to continually sift through the messages in order to determine who may be within the vicinity to meet at a given “present’ moment.
Plancast.com does feature a user's “future” location information but that service generates and displays the information in a different way. It does not use the radar-like interface that displays the information in a very useful graphical format that is the subject of the present invention.